For use: Wednesday, July 12, 2000 and thereafter

 

mfinley.com: "Greatfull [sic] as the Worm"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I returned home from shopping to find a Compaq MV5220 monitor box on my doorstep. But there was no monitor inside. The box had been customized. The corrugated was plastered over with handwritten notes, inkjet splotches, and what seemed to be prehistoric cave drawings.

Inside, wrapped in loose sports pages, I found three objects.

The first was a kind of primitive club, an aluminum rod ending in a head, with a cloth hood pulled over the face, tied with a drawstring. When I undid the hood, I was staring at a weird, totemic face with flat screws going in one nostril and one ear, and a bushy head of bright green hair. The expression on the head was of defiance and possibly hostility -- but it also seemed to have a sad vulnerability, as if the defiance belied something mushier inside.

The next object was a paperback book: Bad As I Want to Be, the recent autobiography of Dennis Rodman.

That's when it occurred to me -- the face on the mallet-head, which looked plucked from an anthropology textbook, was Rodman's. On the book cover, Rodman sits completely naked on motorcycle, with two basketballs artfully lodged between his legs. On the book jacket his hair was blonde, not green. But who can keep up with such things?

On the flap is this quote: "If I die young, everybody's going to say they saw it coming."

OK, now I'm getting the drift. The third object brought it all together, a note from DRNERO13, aka my friend Dan. Dan is a very creative but down-to-earth guy who seems to infuse all that he does with kindness, humor, and inspiration. Example: on his Little League team, he assigns manly baseball names to all the tremulous 9-year-olds. If you tiptoe onto the team as a Michael or a Cullen or a Scoot, you stride forcefully out as a T-bone, an Axeman, or a Biff.

I coach Little League too, in a more bliss-oriented, twitchy-fingered way -- my fellow coaches call me the Deepak Chopra of baseball. But that's not quite right, and Dan's letter explains why.

Here's the note, with Dan's spellings intact:

Happy Birthday Bro --

I'm greatfull to be able to read your stuff -- I never go online until my family is in bed so I can enjoy your storys.

In my basement I have a couple million puppets I've made. It scares the hell out of Minnegasco [the gas company - Ed] when they come over to fix my furnace.

So I decided to make you the Worm puppet for your birthday -- I really beleave you two are alike -- you are as bad as you wanna be and that's why I dig you and your email ministry.

Thanks for the memories -- DRNERO13.

The Worm, of course, is Rodman. On the Compaq box I read the notes. They are all from Rodman naming his favorite writers -- I am in there among the top guys. And one statement: "Dennis Rodman is the Mike Finley of sports!" And I'm thinking how easily, how automatically, most people would invert that sentence, so that the famous guy is the archetype for the unfamous guy. But not DRNERO.

So the party starts. It was supposed to be held at a big town hall out in Marine on St. Croix, but not enough people RSVP'd so we moved it to our house in Saint Paul. And everyone who arrives has to look at my Worm-on-a-Stick and read Dan's letter. It's fairly weird, so some people just smile fondly and nod. Others get it, and are stunned, as I was, by the implications of being of the identical blood as Dennis Rodman -- indeed, being the prototype upon which the Worm bases his entire life. I imagine Rodman lying awake at night planning the next day's outrages: "I'm got to be more individualistic! What would Finley do in this position?"

Whether this is true or not, it's a lovely thing to hear on your fiftieth birthday, and even lovelier to believe.

And I know what you are thinking: this fellow has misspelled the word grateful, so let us therefore call his remaining worldview into question. But that is where you not possibly be wronger, because greatfull is better than grateful. For what is grateful, when you poke it with a stick, but something to do with a grate that is full of something? Whereas greatfull is not merely great but full of its greatness, and great for its fullness.

From this day forth, DRNERO, and for the next fifty years I will spell it greatfull, when that is the meaning I am meaning.

And that is the meaning I am meaning right now.

 

Order Dennis Rodman's Bad As I Wanna Be

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley